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Belkin's WeMo uses Crowdsourced "Recipes" for Smart Homes

The future is already here, William Gibson wrote. It’s just not evenly distributed.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, I was looking for the future in the form of disruptive technologies—the ones not yet ready to change the world, but maybe in a few years, or perhaps, as it turns out, in six months. I was looking, in other words, for technologies that exemplify what I coined The Law of Disruption: social, political, and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.

As the gap between what technology can do and what humans can absorb gets wider, the new stuff seems increasingly weird. I was looking for the weirdest.

I found plenty of disruptors at CES, but they weren't evenly distributed over the nearly two million square feet of exhibit space that spills out from the Las Vegas Convention Center and several nearby hotels. To find them, I had to look, literally, around the edges. I skipped over the giant, flashy exhibits front and center in the giant exhibition halls, with 3D everything, pulsing music and impossibly attractive women, and headed to the small booths at the farthest edges, the ones manned by just two clearly over-caffeinated guys: the innovator and the VP of Everything Else.

Better yet, seekers of disruption could skip the booths altogether and head for the hospitality suite of a nearby (or not) hotel, one which doubles as the crash pad of the entire development team, who code, do demos, and sleep in uneven shifts. Or to one of a dozen or more hackathons that sprung up around town, where developers who may not even have a place to crash stay up all night developing an app on a fixed timetable whose only strategic imperative is that it’s cooler than someone else’s.

Back to those guys in a moment. For now, I can sum up the bulk of the show in one word: more. More as in more pixels (Ultra HD TVs), more connections (connected homes, connected cars, connected people), more apps (all your apps, everywhere, and all your devices), more inches (displays), more sensors (self-organizing robots), more me (customizable everything).

Or maybe instead of more I mean Moore, as in Moore’s Law, the driving principle that explains and unifies absolutely everything at CES. Every twelve to eighteen months, unlike any other commodity in history, computing power get faster, cheaper, and smaller, driving disruptive change increasingly faster than our incremental brains can handle it.

The more this year was largely focused on inputs and outputs. Inputs as in new ways of interacting with technology through voice, touch, sensors of all kinds, and even eye movements. Outputs as in new ways of feeding back information after it has been sent up to the cloud, mixed, processed and analyzed, and sent back down, whether to tablets, smartphones, game devices or other smart things – cars, refrigerators, headsets, eyeglasses, light bulbs—even a fork that vibrates and blinks if you eat too fast.

Like the fork, everything is “smart”—meaning it’s connected wirelessly to everything else, and can take in and send back information to and from the cloud any way the apps wants. Some find that level of increasingly predictive, adaptive, and responsive human-device interaction reassuring. Others find it creepy. Fortunately for the CES crowd, the creepiness wears off fast. Just in time for the next wave of disruptions, anyway.

The faster part of Moore’s Law explains the emphasis on more. But the cheaper and smaller are what really drive the disruptors. In televisions, for example, the continuing drop in price and size for OLED chips (LEDs based on organic compounds that emit light when triggered by electrical impulses) means it’s now cost-effective to stuff enough of them into a display to make a picture that is not only Ultra HD but which is also thin enough to be bent. Samsung showed off the first curved TV screens, and at a keynote, brought out prototypes of fully flexible displays.

Cheaper and smaller also upend traditional rules of start-up development. Two different 3D printers that melt plastic wire to produce prototypes and even usable products captured the imagination of this year’s attendees. But the two companies, 3D Systems and MakerBot, came at the consumer market from radically different starting points.

3D Systems developed its mass market product the old-fashioned way, spending years building expensive, industrial equipment that produces prototypes for high-end product developers. As they waited for the price and quality of 3D printing to reach levels affordable for consumers, serving niche vertical markets kept the company funded and allowed it to develop deep expertise in 3D printing technology.

MakerBot, on the other hand, never bothered with a strategy, or even with a business, before going directly to consumers. The company was founded, an enthusiastic rep told me in their far-flung booth, by a couple of guys from the hacker activist community, who started by cobbling together off-the-shelf component parts and offering them to the enthusiastic do-it-yourself tinkerers at conventions called Maker Faires.

3D Systems has expertise in the core technologies, but MakerBot is much closer to the mass market users. It’s not clear which if either will win in the emerging market of self-assembling things, but in the end, expertise in the core technology always becomes a liability. It’s natural to think like your customers, and that can blind you to the possibilities of the disruptively cheaper if only briefly inferior new technology.

In both cases, getting consumers just meant waiting for Moore’s Law. Except in the case of MakerBot, they didn’t wait so much as come up with their idea at the moment it became just barely feasible.

There’s more—much more—of this kind of counter-intuitive thinking going on at the edges of innovation. For now, here are the five most disruptive ideas I saw--this week, anyway:

1. Fighting the power – Computing of course has gone completely wireless, but several vendors offering variations on wireless power suggest that energy may just be another form of bits. Powermat has been around since 2006. Fulton Innovation, another wireless power innovator, now offers a product that can conductively charge a smartphone even when the charger isn’t in physical contact with--let alone connected to--the device. Nearby is good enough

But the more disruptive innovation was PowerTrekk, which provides you with your own personal hydrogen fuel cell. Scoop up some water, and a cartridge filled with basic chemicals extracts the hydrogen to charge a small battery, leaving sand as the residual product. The product, which will go on sale this spring at REI for about $200, is today just at the NPR Pledge Drive premium stage, but could represent a breakthrough in energy generation.

Hydrogen fuel cell development has been going on for years, focused on high-end markets for charging vehicles. Development costs are high, progress has been slow, and environmental concerns are hard to define or alleviate. PowerTrekk offers the same basic technology, but on such a small scale that it can use simpler chemistry and inert materials.